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Rigor and Talk Checklist for Nonfiction Texts

In a school last week, a teacher asked if we could share with her what it is Bob Probst and I listen for when we’re assessing student conversations. “How do you know if they are talking at a surface level or really digging deeper?”

We thought it was a good question. In fact, a couple of years ago as we left a classroom, congratulating one another on the small group conversations students had conducted, we found ourselves wondering much the same thing as Bob asked the critical question, “What made their talk rigorous and what should we do next time we are with them to encourage even deeper thinking?”

He was responding to the number of times we had said (to one another) “Wow, the kids did a really good job” and “They were really super today” and “That was a great class.” Those general statements couldn’t help us actually plan what we needed to do next. They captured our excitement of the moment, but those comments couldn’t really help us think about what we should do next to encourage even deeper thinking.

So, we set about doing something that occasionally seemed silly to us – we created a checklist of behaviors we could watch for to help us identify the rigor of the conversation. We say it sometimes seemed a silly endeavor, because, of course, rigor can’t be reduced to a checklist! At the same time, though, we wanted a list of behaviors that we could watch for (listen for) as we observed student conversations. Such a list would help us move from “That was a really great conversation” to “The students were using the vocabulary of the topic and turning to the text for evidence, but are not yet (for instance) showing the patience we want as students share ideas.” Eventually we settled on a list of behaviors that became the Rigor and Talk Checklist for Literary Texts that we included in Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading (and that list has been published on this blog in a previous post).

When we began working on Reading Nonfiction (and we’re counting DAYS until it is released!), we decided to rethink our checklist focusing now on what we wanted to hear in conversations about nonfiction.

Though this checklist (see below) appears in the forthcoming book, we wanted to share it here, now, so it is perhaps helpful as soon as possible. Again, we use this as we’re listening to students, noticing what it is they do well and identifying areas we need to encourage.